Artificial intelligence is improving processes and operations on a wide variety of fronts – from customer service, to marketing and sales, and beyond. Chatbots are one of the specific areas in which AI driving improvement. And Comm100 is explaining how.
The digital customer conversation solution provider today unveiled a second-generation, AI-enhanced version of its chatbot. It is available now.
Comm100’s initial chatbot could deliver pre-programmed answers to certain, pre-programmed questions. However, this new chatbot employs AI and natural language processing (text-based, not audio) to understand and respond to customer intents without being programmed for them, explains Kaye Chapman, the company’s customer experience and training expert.
That enables the new chatbot to respond to customer inquiries. It can also assist customers in completing transactions, such as paying a credit card bill. It can even see what a customer bought in the past to attain data on customer preferences and details such as shoe size, says Jeff Epstein, Comm100’s vice president of product marketing and communications.
The second-generation chatbot is based on Comm100’s own technology paired with the Google Dialogflow. Google’s NLP engine supports a wide array of different languages.
Also new with the second-generation Comm100 chatbot is integration with Shopify. That provides agents who work with the chatbot to see customers’ current shopping carts and order histories.
The new chatbot also allows for co-browsing, although this feature is not yet AI powered. However, Comm100 plans to employ AI for that in the future. (And, to ensure privacy, the current co-browsing feature requires the visitor to request and accept co-browsing.)
The company’s chatbot technology is used by a variety of companies in banking and finance, higher education, manufacturing, retail and ecommerce, and other verticals. For example, a Brazilian bank uses the chatbot in an online banking application. And some retailers employ the Comm100 chatbot to help their live agents find answers more quickly for website visitors.
Today about 60 percent of Comm100’s business is in Asia Pac. The other 40 percent is in the Western Hemisphere. But now the company is making a big push into North America, and the AI-enabled chatbot is a key part of that effort.
“We’re about to crash open the barn doors and come into the North American market with a nine-year-old solution that's been proven. And we’ve added some horsepower to it,” says Epstein.